Category: News

Grazed from CIO.  Author: Paul Trotter.

With employees across the company empowered with greater access to technology, the tech expertise inside your business is no longer limited to the IT department. In many businesses, Sales and Marketing, HR and Finance are leading the discussions, with Line of Business (LOB) specific insight into the cloud solutions that can help drive their departments forward.

Yet many companies are struggling to accommodate the often competing views of LOB executives and the IT department, and in some cases there’s a battle for control…

Grazed from TopTechNews.  Author: Jennifer LeClaire.

CRM Relevant Products/Services giant Salesforce has come up with a new way to help enterprises drive more value from big data Relevant Products/Services and tap into more customer insights via its Analytics Cloud. It’s called Salesforce Wave for Big Data and it’s coming to market with an impressive partner list that includes Google, Cloudera, Hortonworks, New Relic, Informatica and Trifacta.

Salesforce Wave for Big Data aims to meet a valid — and big — need in the industry. According to the EMC Digital Universe Study, the digital universe is doubling in size every two years. If you can imagine it, the digital universe will multiply 10-fold between 2013 and 2020, from 4.4 trillion to 44 trillion gigabytes…

Read more from the source @ http://www.toptechnews.com/article/index.php?story_id=13100267EC52

Grazed from Fortune. Author: Heather Clancy.

The explosion last year in venture funding for education technology—more than $1.87 billion invested—wasn’t strictly earmarked for K-12 classrooms, colleges and universities. A fast-growing portion of ed-tech investments is squarely focused on corporate cyberlearning applications as businesses struggle to fill skills gaps and retain talent.

As one vivid illustration, consider the $1.5 billion paid by LinkedIn to acquire Lynda.com, a venerable subscription-based online learning company in business for two decades. Wrote LinkedIn CEO Jeff Weiner, in a blog post justifying the deal: “I believe we need to transition from a 20th century approach heavily reliant on rote learning to a 21st century curriculum focused on collaboration, critical reasoning and creative problem solving; provide more opportunities for experiential vs. textbook learning; better equip teachers to cater to multiple forms of intelligence vs. simply focusing on math and verbal skills; ensure compassion is taught in every classroom; and provide today’s students with the skills they need to obtain the jobs that are and will be vs. the jobs that once were.”…

Read more from the source @ http://fortune.com/2015/05/28/education-technology-hire-learning/

Grazed from ZDNet. Author: Larry Dignan.

Google is betting that it can infuse machine learning throughout its various cloud and mobile products to create an advantage over Apple and other rivals. Whether it’s the launch of Google’s new photo service, Google Now or the new Android, machine learning appears to be an emerging common thread.

Google rolled out Google Photos and the differentiator is going to be search and machine learning to categorize them. The pitch with Google Photo is that the search giant will create a home for photos and videos and use machine learning to "make memories not manage them," said Anil Sabharwal, director of Google Photos…

Grazed from ITWorldCanada. Author: Don Sheppard.

Is cloud computing “business as usual” for the IT project manager (the PM)? Are cloud-based projects really any different from traditional projects? Since cloud computing is now enterprise-class, we can no longer ignore cloud solutions for IT projects. For the PM, however, cloud computing is still relatively new and can be a significant challenge, at least it is here in Canada.

PMs are, or should soon be, deciding how cloud computing can affect the execution of their projects. Does it reduce delivery times? Does it simplify the technical tasks? Does it increase project risk? Does it radically change the infrastructure or application development processes? There can be many questions, and the answers aren’t always straightforward…

Grazed from BetaBoston. Author: Curt Woodward.

Threat Stack, a growing digital security company based in Cambridge, has hired its third chief executive as it seeks to add more customers in the cloud-computing sector. Brian Ahern, formerly the founder and CEO of Foxborough-based security company Industrial Defender, is Threat Stack’s new boss. He replaces Doug Cahill, who was brought on as CEO last year.

At Industrial Defender, Ahearn built a company that helped owners of oil refineries, electric power plants, and other industrial facilities identify and thwart cyberattacks against the software controlling their complicated systems. The company was acquired by Lockheed Martin last year…

Grazed from CloudComputing. Author: James Bourne.

Cloud storage provider Box has announced that it is working with the US Department of Justice (DOJ) to deliver secure file sharing and collaboration to its employees. The move represents a major customer win for the firm, who now has more than 40 federal customers on its books.

“Innovative government agencies, like DOJ, are deeply committed to leveraging emerging cloud technologies to better serve the American people, while ensuring the security and privacy of sensitive information,” said Aaron Levie, Box CEO. “We are thrilled to support the DOJ’s technology efforts, helping to transform the way they manage and share information,” he added…

Grazed from CCI. Author: William Rabie.

The pace of businesses migrating to the cloud is accelerating. In the UK in particular there certainly seems to be a larger and faster adoption of cloud services. A recent survey from the Cloud Industry Forum stated that more than eight out of ten UK companies currently store some or all of their data in the cloud. Published in May this year, the research found that 84% of firms have now adopted one or more cloud services – that’s up from 78% in June 2014 and an increase of 75% since 2010.

These statistics don’t surprise me at all. With increased cloud adoption we are also seeing an acceleration of take up of Disaster Recovery as a Service (DRaaS). Whether safeguarding against human error, cyberattacks, small scale events or even big natural disasters, companies are now turning to DRaaS as a way to avoid serious risk without breaking the bank…

Grazed from ComputerWorld. Author: Joab Jackson.

Australian energy company Woodside Energy hopes to strike a gusher in its own backyard — a gusher of information, that is. The company plans to improve the efficiency of its refinery plants by using IBM’s Watson cognitive computing services to gather and share insights from its own engineers.

Woodside "wants to take the knowledge of their senior engineers and make it available, with the support of Watson, to a broader range of employees," said Ed Harbour, IBM vice president of the company’s Watson Group. The two companies will partner to create a search engine, or "cognitive advisory service," that can be used by Woodside’s engineering teams to ask complex questions about facilities management and design, according to IBM…

Grazed from BCN. Author: Editorial Staff.

China Unicom and Akamai have announced a partnership that will see the two companies integrate their cloud services and content delivery network, respectively. The deal between China Unicom’s cloud division CU Cloud and Akamai will see the former offer the latter’s full portfolio of content delivery, web performance and security offerings, a move CU Cloud said will improve global access to its growing suite of cloud services.

Akamai’s turnkey CDN technology will also underpin global delivery of its cloud services, CU Cloud said. “China Unicom is a major carrier in China, serving the global internet market,” said Noam Freedman, senior vice president of Akamai’s global networks division. “We’re excited to be partnering with CU cloud to tap into the fast-growing China cloud and CDN market. Akamai sees increased demand for delivering content to Chinese internet users from global customers…